We Want To Hear Your Story
We want to hear from you whether you are a seasoned veteran with Chaos to Connection or you are just starting out and wondering where to begin. What are your questions, concerns, and fears about heart-centered parenting and the essentials? How has heart-centered parenting impacted your life and your relationship with your teen? Share your story here.
shimmer
Forgiveness, Perseverance and Vision
We appreciate the work that you are doing. We thank you for making changes in your life so that you, your teen and your family can thrive. You are making changes that will last a life time and that create joy in your family. As you continue on your journey, Chaos to Connection: 9 Heart-Centered Essentials for Parenting Your Teen’s book, short films and personalized parent coaching session is with you every step of the way. With Chaos to Connection you are never alone.
The Essentials
Shimmer portrays the power of forgiveness and unconditional love within a family, and introduces the heart-centered essentials of FORGIVING oneself and others, PERSEVERING in love, and developing the collective VISION to anticipate change.
Parenting is full of life! Because parenting is full of life, it is full of all that life has to offer. There is change and chaos, joy and celebrations, losses and accomplishments. You will never have a perfect situation, free from the stresses and joys of life, in which to parent. But through the nine heart-centered essentials, you can connect with your child with all that life has to offer, as seen in Shimmer.
A key essential to connecting with your teen is forgiveness. Like Mark and Gillian in Shimmer, through forgiveness—forgiving yourself and removing judgments about your child’s behavior—you open the door to a loving and connected relationship with your teen. As this relationship develops, you persevere in the journey with your teen, coming back to the nine heart-centered essentials to connect with your child through whatever your family experiences on the journey. As well, you have a new found joy and boldness about your future and the ability and time to co-create a shared family vision.
Like Mark and Gwen, through heart-centered essentials, you can learn to forgive, persevere and have vision for your family.
Testimonials
Forgiveness, perseverance and vision are powerful heart-centered essentials to developing a sense of “we” and “us” in a family. Families come to a place where everyone is growing, flourishing, having fun together, and thriving. The family culture has become one of awareness, curiosity, self-knowing, and unconditional love to meet each member where she is in the moment.
Like these parents, you can learn how to forgive, persevere and have vision for your family. Parents who are using these heart-centered essentials and are encouraged by the change in their relationship with their teen:
“I used to have so much guilt about when we sent our daughter to a treatment program. I felt like I had betrayed my daughter and every argument with my daughter circled around that one event. When I forgave myself and realized I had done the best I could at that moment, I was able to be in the moment with my daughter and to better understand my daughter’s behavior and feelings so that we could connect.”
“Forgiveness of myself and perseverance in my relationship with my son really opened the door to me being able to just be there for him. I saw him really grow in forgiving himself and understanding why he acted the way he did.” “Our family has grown so much closer! We actually have fun talking about the future together and making plans for things to do as a family and individually. We used to be so afraid to talk about the future.”
FAQS
- When I focus on forgiveness it feels like I am condoning my teen’s behavior. How do I work with forgiveness and at the same time talk with my teen about his behavior?
First, remember that by forgiving you will be working to forgive yourself for judging your teen’s behavior. In heart-centered parenting, you see your teen’s behavior as him doing the best he can in the state of being he is acting from. Once you are able to forgive yourself for perceiving your teen as “doing” something to hurt you, you will be able to drop your judgment and talk with your teen from a loving place. From an open, non-judgmental place, you can better understand where the behavior came from and then begin to address how your teen can find other ways to calm himself.
- It feels like we are going to be taking care of our teen for the rest of her life. When do we push her out of the nest?
Check in with yourself and see if you have an agenda about when you think your teen needs to be ready to fly the nest. In our culture, there is an assumed readiness at 18 years old. This doesn’t take into account our teen’s emotional readiness to leave home. Often in pushing this agenda to get a child ready to launch at 18, parents aren’t attuning to their child’s own readiness. Teens mature at different ages. As parents, attuning with your teen’s emotional readiness to take steps, even if it looks like they are delayed, will allow her to emotionally mature and take her own steps toward launching.
- How do we stay in the moment and still vision around the future?
Visioning is a wonderful, creative exercise to do with your teen. Staying in the moment and not getting attached to the plan makes visioning a living, breathing daily practice. So many times, parents have visions for their teens, and then when they don’t meet those visions, parents begin to push them and judge them as being lazy, irresponsible or slow. When parents do this, they have lost the joy of visioning. If a teen is not moving in the direction a family envisioned together, it is time to sit back down, in the moment, and create a new vision from where the family and teen is, instead of feeling disappointment that the original vision was not met. Staying with the flow of where your teen truly is, at the moment, will allow your visioning to move and flow until your teen engages his own passion and then lives out his true vision.
